“I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers on other sections,” said politics editor Lex McMenamin. “After today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.” Why is Condé cutting what worked best at Teen Vogue? www.commondreams.org/news/teen-vo...

Sheffield Hallam University complied with a demand from Beijing to order a professor to stop researching supply chains and forced labour in China. They’ve now been referred to counter-terrorism police for th ‘assisting a foreign intelligence service’. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

‘If he could reach the woodlot by dawn, he might be pulled to safety and surgical care. If not, he’d almost certainly end up like countless other soldiers in this war: his last wretched seconds recorded for social media’s 24-7 snuff-film deathstream.’ By CJ Chivers www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/m...

An interview with his video team: ‘I come from film. Anthony comes from film. Deb comes from marketing. Donald comes from outer space. None of us even know the rules of traditional DC political communication, so I don't even think it occurred to us to do it that way.’ defector.com/selling-zohran

‘Mamdani and his team — and the burgeoning DSA political machine — arrived at the exact moment Americans were ready to talk about class and found the best way to hijack our new world of short-form (and long-form) video to make sure you actually heard them.’ www.garbageday.email/p/we-did-it-zo

In better news: new shape just dropped that can’t pass through itself without touching the sides. It’s called a Noperthedron. Is it useful for anything? Well, Sergey Yurkevich who co-discovered it has a 3D printed one holding pens on his desk? www.quantamagazine.org/first-shape-...

The headlines on this story are so infuriating: maximum clickbait. So many ppl I follow have been blithely tweeting ‘Bill Gates doesn’t care about climate change’, which isn’t remotely the case. Instead, Bill Gates is saying his priority is reducing human suffering. Oooh how wicked. Condemn him!

‘Most scammers have themselves been scammed. The tens of thousands of Chinese, Ethiopians, Ugandans, Filipinos, Pakistanis and others who carry out the grunt work have been tricked, kidnapped and enslaved.’ @alexclapp.bsky.social on the vast cybercrime economy. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

A strong first issue for the new @equatormag.bsky.social. Soyonbo Borjgin on a journalist’s life at 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘳 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘢 𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘦𝘬𝘭𝘺 Here’s the opening paragraph and it just pretty much keeps going like this www.equator.org/articles/the...

‘There is indeed some elemental substance that enters human history from the non-human realm, bringing with it cycles of infernal violence.’ James Lasdun reviews 𝘔𝘶𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥 by Caroline Fraser, on the late 20th century epidemic of serial killers in the Pacific NW. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Interesting thread on the way even 'alternative' technologies such as Signal necessarily work these days - and why they can't route round dependency on Amazon.

‘We met like that year after year. In Berlin, always in summer, sometimes in London. And I always I felt the same, that I’d hit the jackpot, my best friend was Phoebus Apollo.’ Lauren J. Joseph in the @grantamag.bsky.social series ‘Dead to Me’, on social separations. granta.com/cmon-billy/

I cannot believe that this – 16:44 – is London sunset. Down with clocks, down with all forms of standardised time. We shall now be mostly living in the dark until March or something 🌚😭

New Delhi is set to use cloud-seeding to create artificial rain for the first time, after a so-called 'airpocalypse' of toxic smog engulfed the capital this week, in part due to the use of firecrackers during Diwali. (Delhi has terrible seasonal smog to begin with) www.context.news/climate-risk...

‘Depending on who you talk to, you might be told that you cannot exclude trans people, that you can, or that you must. What does this mean for the day-to-day reality of using the toilet in the UK? Chaos.’ www.liberalcurrents.com/nobody-knows...

I swear I try to engage with UK environmental stories... But then our lithium mining vs. local communities conflicts are not these great dramas of ecology vs. energy transition ...but rather local fondness for two waste heaps called ‘Flatty’ and ‘Pointy’. theconversation.com/as-mining-re...

Threatened by America’s interest in Greenland, Denmark takes steps to address the grievances that are fuelling Greenlanders’ desire for independence. Striking how much of Denmark's wrongdoing has been specifically reproductive-centred – that is, eugenic. observer.co.uk/news/interna...

“The problem is we’ve always just been to step one, which is the research,” said Raul, an Imperial County resident. “It’s 2025. Plenty of studies explain the problems. We need to move to step two, which is eliminate the pollutants from where we’re living.” eu.desertsun.com/story/news/e...

Friends of mine's plans disrupted last weekend by the fact Beijing curbed exports of five critical metals back in February as a response to Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods - meaning that the abandoned tungsten mine they'd planned to go dungeon-crawl has now in fact reopened.

Cal Revely-Calder on Paul Kingsnorth: ‘“Population” appears in his prose shadowed by “growing,” and “mass,” as if it were a pestilence. One wonders what he thinks should happen to these human beings. Perhaps they are beyond help. Perhaps the rest of us are, too.’ www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Lillian Fishman on the Fitzcarraldo classes’ fear of porn. Really very good. ‘It’s a commonplace that all the best things in life arrive at the edge of hurt, as a result of risk.’ (Love, for one.) ‘Why do we think sex is the exception?’ thepointmag.com/criticism/th...

‘Most young people today have barely any concept of what privacy might feel like, let alone why it might matter to them.’ — Kathryn Jezer-Morton www.thecut.com/article/kids...

‘Until today, I’ve not understood that my body is me, it is my life, rather than something that produces results.’ Odd that it's apparently normal(?) that people aren't really 𝘪𝘯 their bodies: y’all out there acting as mech pilots, not integrated body-minds. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

‘Think about it: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. That only makes them more honest.’ harpers.org/archive/2025...

In desert eastern California, Los Angeles pumps huge amounts of groundwater - equivalent to 15% of the city's use - only to return the water back to Owens Lake to keep down dust. This doesn't make much sense. @ianjames.bsky.social reports on “a man-made drought” www.latimes.com/environment/...

‘01 infused the usual struggle of being young in the city with a sense of intensity and purpose. “I wanted to be cool, and it felt cool. In New York, a lot of people will ask you, ‘Are you an artist?’ This gave me a reason to say ‘yes.’”’ On Angelicism. www.thecut.com/article/ange...

‘Majorities of Americans don’t trust the news because they don’t trust what they get in the news’s place. Reliable information is reported and written every day, but the less it’s available to everyone, the more garbage media poisons the entire project.’ talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/dcs-a...

Is this the Observer describing famed fashion ‘sletter Blackbird Spyplane as ‘the sort of hypnotic, highly idiosyncratic manifesto that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, might have written if he’d traded domestic terrorism for trend forecasting’? observer.co.uk/style/fashio...

‘How does she feel about entering her 80s? “Well, I have no notion of time.”’ Michelle Lamy is magnificent. observer.co.uk/style/fashio...

‘The financing tool is you go to Broadcom and you put your arm around their shoulder and you gesture sweepingly in the distance and whisper “omniscient robots” and they say “do you have hundreds of billions of dollars” and you whisper “omniscient robots” again and they are enlightened.’ On Open AI

‘All across the board, the language that comes from this layer of the internet has a mechanistic, gamelike aura, as if life were mostly just a web of tactics and hacks and mutual manipulation.’ The internet has overtaken Black culture as the source of American slang www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/m...

Dating: it just gets worse. Also arguably a crisis of literacy, in that if you can’t tell – from both style and content – that someone’s using AI to write a reply, then you’re not going to knock their chat on the head as fast as it requires. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

‘Coolness is a distinctive feature of modern art, its capacity to generate “relevance” its stock-in-trade & the battle to define and express “the now” a central organizing principle of art-world competition. A crisis of cool is then an existential problem.’ chrismarino.substack.com/p/the-death-...

‘When I was a 14-year-old gay kid in the American South and pulled Baldwin’s novel off a bookstore shelf, it radically reoriented my relationship to dignity. The more I’ve read and taught the novel, the harder I’ve found this to explain.’ — @garthgreenwell.bsky.social harpers.org/archive/2025...

As a principle, ‘You can just do things’ is both ‘broadly true, admirable, and helpful’ - and neoliberal, anti-social bullshit. @jjvincent.bsky.social good on a phrase that's particularly buzzy in 9-9-6 grind Silicon Valley and EA communities. thebaffler.com/latest/high-...

‘The writing had sucked, I thought, and yet this terrible muddy prose was being elevated into a spectacle for dishonest reasons - mostly so rich young people could get together and play-act as literati.’ www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub...

‘If you spend that much time thinking about the worst, most transgressive thing you could do in any given moment, that feeling eventually hardens into desire.’ Max Pearl on Samanta Schweblin's ‘Good and Evil and Other Stories’ substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Is everything about culture ‘actually just downstream from cheap rent (and its disappearance)’, and is it ‘even possible to have a meaningful conversation about cultural criticism that’s not just about that?’ Emily Segal went back to Berlin and it had changed: open.substack.com/pub/nemesisg...

‘All the algae and fungi, the recycled water bottles and seaborne-plastics have made not a blind bit of difference to the planetary crisis, and design as a profession and an industry knows it.’ @edwinheathcote.bsky.social on design’s existential crisis: www.ft.com/content/e637...

The list of books included in the Anthropic copyright settlement is now up. If you published a book before July 2021 and it ended up on Libgen file sharing, there's a good chance you'll be eligible to claim c.$3K before fees Search for yours and file a claim: www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

Participants in China’s intense fan culture ‘know that real-life idols can disappoint’, Yun Sheng writes. ‘It’s safer to worship the dead or invented than the living. One tribute to circulate online lately was a Labubu doll placed in front of Marx’s tomb in London.’ www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The list of books included in the Anthropic copyright settlement is now up. If you published a book before July 2021 and it ended up on Libgen file sharing, there's a good chance you'll be eligible to claim c.$3K before fees Search for yours and file a claim: www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

Human beings have never seen the Sierra Nevada ice-free: its glaciers formed before our species reached the Americas. But by the end of this century they will. Many glaciers have lost 70-90% of their ice since the late 1800s, and are projected to melt completely. www.latimes.com/environment/...

Also Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford, oh my god. I am so glad he’s back, and properly funded. Is he the only man left in fashion who can cut a jacket? Probably. 10magazine.com/tom-ford-rea...

‘What I’m proposing is not a fantasy, it is a valid and viable way of living.’ Rick Owens on cake, Luxor, gay literature, exquisite little tea vessels, a 1920s monkey fur coat, his bald cat and the extravagance of building your life around a daily nap. www.ft.com/content/c959...

‘For Greeks of a certain vintage, to be a seer was, specifically, to see (and think) ahead in time. Blindness – either of the occipital lobe, or in the dark of the adyton/cave – may not have been a prerequisite for oracular vision, but it didn't hurt.’ wchambliss.wordpress.com/2025/10/01/n...

The framing of this – ‘big-hitter’ journalists but using their ‘redundancy payouts’ to pay for the launch – is a bit 😬😬😬, no? It plays it too small and misses the point of the new newsletter biz model! pressgazette.co.uk/news/former-...

Speaking of Kern County, California City – a planned utopia in the Mojave desert – now has an ICE detention centre. And it’s going as badly as you would expect: dirty water, not enough food, mistreatment by guards. ‘Hell on earth,’ one detainee reports. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

‘All you’ve got is memory, a place where you can’t live.’ Discovering Kaleb Horton’s work – his California, the farming towns at the edge of the desert; my California too, though I don’t know when I can ever go back there. From his obituary for Merle Haggard: kalebhorton.ghost.io/from-the-arc...

“It’s not rewilding, it’s not restoration, it’s resurrection. If you want to recreate a woodland you’ve got to plan it and plant your own trees. Here it’s all ready to go, like an instant cake mix – just add water.” UCL geographers are restoring Ice Age ponds www.theguardian.com/environment/...